CEDAR: The First All-Sky Airglow Imaging Studies at Geomagnetic Conjugate Sites in Europe and Africa

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Proposal Number: AGS - 1552045Principal Investigator: Jeffrey BaumgardnerInstitution: Boston UniversityProposal title: CEDAR: The First All-Sky Airglow Imaging Studies at GeomagneticConjugate Sites in Europe and AfricaABSTRACTThis project will significantly advance an existing collaboration between Boston University, the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), and the University of Padua in Italy to investigate hemispheric asymmetries in upper atmospheric phenomena using a unique configuration of magnetically conjugate all-sky imagers. The SANSA and Padua expertise are essential to the project because instrumentation will be physically located at these two sites. The imagers were previously developed by BU and installed under separate funding. The Padua imager is the first continuously operating all-sky upper-atmospheric imager on the European continent. With its conjugate imager at SANSA, the pair is positioned to shed new light on hemispheric asymmetries at altitudes where the atmosphere transitions into the space environment. The research team, one of the premiere groups in optical aeronomy, proposes to leverage the expertise of the international collaborators and the new type of data set to make important advances in understanding upper atmospheric dynamics. The project will provide an international research experience for a graduate student who will complete a doctoral thesis during the 5-year period of the project. The international collaborations with institutions in Italy and South Africa that will be supported by the project are both compelling and have strategic importance for developing observing capabilities aimed at addressing frontier issues in upper atmosphere - Geospace coupling. In support of this effort, the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) is co-funding this project by supporting all requested international travel through the Global Venture Fund.The target phenomena for this primarily observational investigation include: Stable Auroral Red (SAR) arcs, Medium Scale Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (MSTIDs), ionospheric latitude gradients, and mesospheric waves - all dynamically important signatures of coupling between atmospheric and geospace regions. Exploring the longitudinal and hemispheric differences in these phenomena has the potential for increasing our understanding of the dynamics of the coupled ionosphere-thermosphere-magnetosphere system as it interacts with inputs from space and from the lower atmosphere. The focus on a new longitude sector is important for several reasons. Moving between longitude sectors introduces a changing offset between the geomagnetic coordinate system that organizes space weather inputs and the geographic coordinate system that organizes diurnal and seasonal changes in the atmosphere. In addition, upward propagating disturbances from the lower atmosphere due to weather systems or orography also change with location. Geomagnetic conjugacy has the important effect of selecting locations where the space weather disturbance inputs are similar for a given event but diurnal and seasonal conditions are not. The potential then exists to begin to separate out the effects attributable to the different types of inputs and their interconnections.